Workers Socialist League

Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

Subjectivism Individualism

Socialist Press no. 130: Reference Supplement, Marxist Terminology, 20 December 1978 · scan pp. 3–4 · about 1,186 words

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PrISM tarian abstention from the struggles of the working class with an ultra-left refusal to fight for transitional demands, and an opportunist adaptation to petty bourgeois nationalist leaders such as Yassir Arafat, Libyan dictator Gaddafi and the Iraqi Ba'athist regime as well as the Vietnamese Stalinist regime in Hanoi.

Such positions reflect a failure by Healy to carry through a political break from the methods of Pablo, from whom he spfit organisationally in 1953.

Healy The Trotskyist Transitional Programme adopted in 1938 clearly states that the task of the Fourth International is to carry out a combination of "agitation, propaganda and organisation" in the fight to build parties in each country.

Lenin defined agitation as conveying few ideas to many people, as opposed to propaganda work which consists in conveying a whole complex of ideas to a comparatively few people.

Propagandists are those groups which get so immersed in the production of abstract propaganda that they are unable to relate to the working class.

guerrilla struggle by small groups based in rural areas for the necessary mobilisation of both workers and peasants around a programme of transitional and democratic demands.

Guerrillaism in relation to Latin America became a majority trend within the 'United' Secretariat of the Fourth International in the 1960s, in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution.

The very document on which the 1963 'reunification' took place talked of inserting the 'strategy' of guerrilla warfare into the Trotskyist The policy, enshrined in the 1969 9th World Congress, led to wholesale confusion and to tragic losses among the USFI forces in Latin America, but has only recently been formally discarded by the USFI leadership.

The objective processes of the class struggle and the necessary response by the revolutionary movement can only be understood if the individual is prepared to subordinate his/her personal moods, feelings, preconceptions and prejudices to the task of analysing the conflicting forces at work.

If this is not done, then the subjective feelings of the individual can distort the analysis or cut across the necessary intervention by the revolutionary party in the given situation.

Subjectivism, this failure to engage dispassionately in political analysis, is particularly hard to overcome in the case of people with a professional or petty bourgeois background whose entire educational and social training has taught them to value themselves as individuals and their personal prestige.

Individualism, an expression of subjectivism, arises when individual members of the revolutionary party seek to act not under the discipline of the party, drawing on its strength and assisting its work, but on their own personal whims and decisions, thus cutting themselves off from the party's experience and often sabotaging its actions.

Bourgeois ideology, which portrays everyone as "individuals" and fails to recognise the class divisions of society, reinforces this tendency, and ensures that it is a continuing problem to be fought within the revolutionary movement.

Militant advocacy and struggle for women's rights. Bourgeois feminist movements seek such rights within the framework of capitalism, whereas socialists recognise that the full equality of women is unachievable withouth the socialist transformation of society and the elimination of the oppression of the bourgecs family unit. MINIS politics and single-issue campaigning put forward by the bourgeois feminists.

This leads them into the swamp of "autonomous" women's groups excluding men.

Taken to extremes, radica feminism winds _s as ac:.e hatrec of me=-I÷ -- - :

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Wage "The decline of capitalist society places Bonapartism-side by side with fascism and coupled with it-again on the order of the day ... It suppresses civil war, or precedes it, or does not allow it to rekindle." (Trotsky)

The scientific understanding of Bonapartism was developed by Marx and later Trotsky when they analysed the dictatorships of the emperors Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon I|| in Bonapartist regimes can appear in various guises-headed by bureaucratic cliques A reactionary doctrine invented in 1895 by a Hungarian-born jewish journalist called Theodor Herze.

Herze, who was an admirer of Cecil Rhodes and other nineteenth century colonialists, wrote in his pamphlet The Jewish State that anti-semitism should be opposed not by fighting those responsible for it or by changing the economic and social conditions that brought it about but by setting up a state for Jews, from which all other nationalities would be excluded. (Tunisia), military juntas (Pakistan), or fascist parties, or emerging from within parliamentary democracy (the process under way in Sri Lanka).

In his writings on Germany in 1932, Trotsky showed the conditions under which such regimes are created, and the historical task they are required to perform.

"Two mighty camps are locked in irreconcilable conflict. Neither side can win by parlia mentary means. Neither would Conservative-Liberal coalition published the 'Balfour Declaration' supporting a Jewish statethough not, it should be noted, at the expense of the local inhabitants.

The Zionists later turned against the British and won the support of Stalin's Russia and of the US imperialists for the setting up of the racially exclusive state of Israel in 1948. willingly accept a decision unfavourable to it. Such a split in society foreshadows a civil war.

"The threat of civit war creates a need in the ruling class for an arbiter and commander, for a Caesar. That precisely is the function of Bonapartism ..' •. a Bonaparte is by no means indispensible for Bonapartism. The existence of two irreconcilable camps is enough.

The role of the all-powerful arbiter can be filled by a clique instead of a person...

"Every regime claims to stand above classes, safeguarding Zionist military forces in the 1973 war have brought the Zionists to concentrate on establishing friendly relations with those sections of the Arab bourgeoisie, notably Sadat of Egypt who have little chance of getting • support amongst the masses in their own countries.

The Zionists have won the firm support of a number of British reformist leaders-from Ramsey MacDonald to Harold Wilson and a number of Tribunite 'lefts' today. the interests of the whole. But the affects of social forces cannot be so easily determined as those in the field of mechanics.

The government itself is made of flesh and bone. It is bound up with certain classes and their interests.

In peaceful times a democratic parliament seems to be the best instrument for reconciling conflicting forces. But when fundamental forces veer off at 180-degree angles, pulling in opposite directions, then the opening for a Bonapartist dictatorship appears."

Fascist dictator Franco Desperate 'last card' of crisis-ridden capitalism whereby the most prosperous section of the capitalist class mobilises a rabble of ruined petty businessmen, backward layers of workers, and other reactionary currents around racist, nationalist and anti-union agitation and uses them as a battering ram to attack and destroy the organisations and democratic rights of the working class.

Against fascism, Trotsky argued for a united front of all Wednesa workers organisations, the establishment of workers' defence squads, and a programme of socialist demands designed both to defend past gains and to lead on to the socialist revolution which alone could put an end to the fascist menace. NATIONALISM

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Guerrillaism Seeking to substitute armed

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 130: Reference Supplement, Marxist Terminology, 20 December 1978